Hurricane Forces New Orleans Newspaper to Face a Daunting Set of Obstacles

Jim Amoss, the editor of The Times-Picayune, faced an ugly decision on Tuesday morning. About 240 employees and some members of their families, including one 6-month-old baby, had spent the night in the corridors of the newspaper building at 3800 Howard Avenue in New Orleans, just over a mile northwest of the Superdome.

They seemed to have survived the hurricane: the building was still standing, though a full sheet of glass from one window had been blown out of its casing, slicing through the general manager's office.

Outside, however, the parking lot was submerged and water was rising up the steps to the entrance. And there were reports of a jail break nearby. As the water crept up another riser, he made his decision. "We needed to leave while the leaving was possible," he said.

What followed was an odyssey for Times-Picayune workers as they looked for a new home outside New Orleans while managing to publish their paper -- initially online and eventually in print.

With its readers scattered across the South, the paper turned its affiliated Web site, www.nola.com, into a release valve for the accumulating tales of misery from the city, providing news, crucial information and a missing persons forum that now contains more than 17,000 posts.

The pilgrimage has already joined the lore of The Times-Picayune, which has served New Orleans since 1837 and whose history includes the writers William Faulkner and William Sidney Porter, better known by his pen name, O. Henry.

Other newspapers in the hurricane zone also struggled to publish. The Mississippi Press, in Pascagoula, took refuge in The Mobile Register's offices in Alabama, and used its presses. The Sun Herald, in Gulfport, Miss., managed to print a paper each day last week with the help of The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in Georgia.

But The Times-Picayune became an example of a private business in New Orleans that was able to function, even thrive, through the disaster. At the same time, employees there were coping with the loss of their homes and relocation of their families, just like their neighbors.

And they struggled with their own deepest fears: for five days, the wife and son of a photo technician were missing (they were found on Saturday at a shelter in Houma, La., where they had been airlifted from their neighborhood). But one reporter, Leslie Williams, remains missing.

"We vacillate between utter despair at what's happened to our city and our lives and exhilaration at what we're doing and how our readers are responding to it," Mr. Amoss said.

Last Monday, after the initial blow of Katrina, the idea of evacuation was not being considered, Mr. Amoss said. The electricity was out, but the newspaper had a generator to keep some computers running in the photo studio, which was the most interior, and therefore safest, part of the building.

Staff members and their families who had chosen to stay at the building overnight, some with their spouses, had planned to hunker down and wait out the storm. But by Monday evening, as Katrina was moving on, their sense of safety was eroding.

James O'Byrne, the features editor, and Doug MacCash, the art critic, ventured out on bicycles to inspect the Lakeview neighborhood where Mr. O'Byrne lived. Already, houses were nearly submerged in more than eight feet of water. "I know for a fact my house is gone," Mr. O'Byrne said.

At 10 p.m. Monday, as other news outlets were reporting that the city had escaped destruction, Mark Schleifstein, the paper's environmental reporter, confirmed that a breach had opened in the levee near the 17th Street canal. The article was headlined: "Lakeview Levee Breach Threatens to Inundate City."

That paper was never printed. A power outage shut down the paper's presses, which are housed in the same building, so it was published only on the paper's Web site.

By midmorning on Tuesday, "you couldn't walk out the building without walking in water up to your waist at this point," said Peter Kovacs, the managing editor for news operations. As the water rose, Mr. Amoss and the publisher, Ashton Phelps Jr., devised a plan to leave from the loading docks, using the newspaper's delivery trucks.

"Editors were barking orders through the newsroom and cafeteria, where some were still eating breakfast, to grab what you could put on your lap and move to the loading dock," Mr. Amoss said. About six laptops were carried out. Mr. Kovacs snapped up his toothbrush, a college T-shirt and a cigar.

At 9:40 a.m., the newspaper's Web site displayed this post, clearly punched out in haste: "The Times-Picayune is evacuating it's New Orleans building. Water continues to rise around our building, as it is throughout the region. We want to evaucate our employees and families while we are still able to safely leave our building."

As the trucks were pulling out, Alex Brandon, a photographer, returned to the building with a computer storage card full of photographs. He trudged and swam through the water, handing over the card, said Doug Parker, the photography editor, then returned to work. "He's still on the streets of New Orleans, hasn't had a shower since Monday," Mr. Parker said.

The water sloshed against the grilles of the delivery trucks, some packed with as many as 25 staff members, as they moved slowly along roads leading to the Pontchartrain Expressway. From the back of the trucks, the evacuees could see toppled trees, downed power lines and residents pushing shopping carts and walking along the upper edges of the roads.

The trucks headed for the paper's West Bank bureau, about eight miles south of the Howard Avenue building and a few miles past the city line. There, the editors decided some employees would need to return to the city to continue reporting and taking pictures, and they asked for volunteers. Seven reporters and two photographers climbed into a truck to go back. In total, the newspaper has had about 15 reporters and photographers in New Orleans since the storm hit.

"I'm thinking if there had been another 15 to 30 minutes, our butts would still be in there," Mr. Kovacs said.

The evacuated employees were sent to two locations. By midafternoon Tuesday, many had arrived in Houma, La., where The Courier was offering food, computers, phone lines and, although spotty, Internet connections. Employees' families were dropped off at nearby shelters. The Courier, which is owned by The New York Times Company, had just finished work on its afternoon issue.

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About 12 journalists, led by Dan Shea, a managing editor, stayed in Houma that night, posting news on the Web site and trying to put together an issue of the paper in portable document format, or pdf, which allows for a traditional newspaper layout.

The team had none of their production software and templates, and no access to any of The Times-Picayune's fonts, and was struggling with rolling blackouts. Still, Mary Chauvin, a copy editor, was able to replicate the look of the paper on the fly by cobbling together graphic elements from earlier online editions..

About 60 more Times-Picayune staff members went on to Baton Rouge, La. There, the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University had offered banks of phones and computers.

The paper that appeared the next morning, again in pdf format on the Web site, contained 17 articles and an editorial, all written by staff members, and 12 photographs, only one of which came from The Associated Press.

Photographs taken from the air showed a city washed out; emergency crews climbing on a roof for a rescue, only to find a dead man; refugees in boats; burning buildings; a pile of floating rubble that included a half-submerged car.

A detailed article about the breach near the 17th Street canal by Mr. Schleifstein was headlined: "Flooding Will Only Get Worse."

By Wednesday, reporters were sending articles to their editors from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houston and several spots along the coast, some by whatever landline they could find, often from the homes of friends or relatives. Sometimes, they resorted to powering their laptops using car batteries.

Nola.com became what Mr. Phelps, the Times-Picayune's publisher, called a lifeline, with more than 72 million page views by people around the world, from Sunday to Thursday last week. Mr. Amoss said page views surpassed 30 million on Friday. Before the hurricane, the site received about six million page views a week.

The most frightening experience was still to come for one reporter, Gordon Russell, reporting from New Orleans. Last Thursday, when the streets seemed ripe for riots to break out, he and a photographer drove from the Convention Center into the aftermath of what looked like a shootout. A bloodied body lay on the ground and police officers had their weapons up.

The photographer, Marko Georgiev, a freelancer for The New York Times, said that as he slowed his car to take a photo, the police trained their weapons on the car. Ordered from the car, the two men were pushed face-first against the car and nearby walls with hands up. Police officers threw their notebooks and camera equipment to the ground and ordered them to leave.

Mr. Russell, quoted by his colleagues on the Nola.com Web site later that day, said: "I'm scared. I'm not afraid to admit it. I'm getting out of here." The headline above the report said "City Not Safe for Anyone."

Meanwhile, staff members, straining to report the disaster, were realizing the extent of the damage to their own homes. More than 30 percent of the newspaper staff members had lost their homes, one employee estimated.

Jon Donley, the editor of Nola.com, worked for two days without hearing from his adult daughter before learning she was safe. "He worked posting all that on the Internet, not knowing whether his daughter was alive or not," Mr. O'Byrne said.

Joe Graham, a photo technician, had still not heard from his wife and son by Friday afternoon. Their house was in eastern New Orleans, an area that had some of the worst flooding. On Saturday afternoon, Terry Baquet, the Page 1 editor, was almost giddy as he reported that Mr. Graham's family had been found safe.

At the Washington bureau for the Newhouse newspaper chain, which publishes The Times-Picayune and 25 other newspapers, colleagues said they felt out of touch. "We were only able to reach editors intermittently," said Bill Walsh, The Times-Picayune's Washington reporter. "Some we didn't even know where they were or whether they were all right."

By the weekend, many on the staff were realizing what they had accomplished, although their exuberance was tempered by the tremendous losses endured by the city and the unresolved disappearance of their colleague, Mr. Williams, who had been sent to the Mississippi coast last Monday to cover the storm.

"I'm trying not to let a depressing thought get into my head," Mr. Kovacs said. Mr. Williams is an experienced reporter who was born in the area and has covered many hurricanes.

"It weighs on me; it weighs on all of us," said Mr. Amoss.

Meanwhile, editors were trying to beat back a rumor that the paper would be shut down. On Thursday, Mr. Phelps called the rumor "ridiculous" in a statement. "The Times-Picayune will continue to publish. Period," he wrote.

And indeed, by Friday morning, The Times-Picayune had managed to resume its print editions again. It printed 50,000 copies at The Courier --a "seat of the pants" press run, Mr. Amoss said, its size a guess of how much of an audience the paper would have.

The paper was distributed, using the same delivery trucks that had ferried the staff to safety, to subscribers throughout Louisiana and to the habitable areas of New Orleans. And it was also delivered in bulk to shelters, where it was given away.

There's no telling when, or if, The Times-Picayune can bring its circulation back to the 270,000 that it had a little over a week ago. No one knows the condition of its presses, or how the Howard Avenue building has fared. The Courier will continue to be its printing plant for the time being.

But Mr. Amoss also took heart in the news that readers were pouncing on the paper "like hungry wolves" as soon as it was delivered, and the print run was being increased to 60,000 for today's issue .

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A version of this article appears in print on September 5, 2005, on Page C00001 of the National edition with the headline: HURRICANE KATRINA: THE NEWSPAPER; Reporting, and Living Out, a Calamity. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe